


careful with your words

by alderations



Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [22]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Drugs, F/M, Flirting, Immortality, Mechtober, Medical Procedures, Painkillers, Whumptober 2020, a little bit shippy but like. barely, marius high as balls on painkillers post-mechanization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:09:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27157763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: Marius sleeps for forty-eight hours after the surgery, and then he wakes up in tears.(Whumptober Day 22: drugged; Mechtober Day 22-24: immortality)
Relationships: Raphaella la Cognizi & Marius von Raum
Series: Whumptober/Mechtober 2020 [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1950916
Comments: 19
Kudos: 78
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	careful with your words

Marius sleeps for forty-eight hours after the surgery, and then he wakes up in tears.

If it weren’t for the monitors beeping at his bedside, Raphaella wouldn’t even know that he’s awake, since he’s still strapped down to the bed to keep him from wrecking his new arm in his sleep, and he doesn’t seem to be capable of speech. When she leans over him to get a good look at his face, he’s crying openly but without making a sound, even though his mouth moves as if attempting to wail in agony. Raphaella brushes a hand across his forehead, attempting to soothe him, but she’s never been very good at that.

“Can you hear me?” she asks, checking to make sure his restraints are still in place.

Marius nods.

“I can give you some painkillers, if you’d like. Your body is still adjusting to the nanobots.”

He clamps his jaw shut and nods again, dislodging a few more tears that roll down his flushed cheeks and catch in his beard. That, at least, confirms that he’s in pain and not just having some weird eldritch emotional side effects. Raphaella picks up the bag of IV painkillers that she’d prepared right after surgery, knowing that he’d probably need them; she would’ve given him something sooner, but she doesn’t know how the meds will interact with his mechanism. She certainly didn’t have any, though her own mechanization was less surgery and more “fall dead onto conveniently-placed wings and let them do the work.”

Once the drug cocktail is in his system, Marius falls asleep within a few minutes, his face still tense but no longer actively sobbing. Raphaella finds a clean washcloth and wipes the tears from his face, then checks the bandages on his arm to make sure he’s not bleeding  _ too  _ much. To her surprise, when she pulls back the final layer of gauze, his skin has already meshed with the metal in several places, though there’s still obvious scarring around the attachment site. That, she figures, means the mechanism is doing its job. Even if it continues to hurt him.

Reassured, Raphaella checks to make sure that the computer on the other side of Marius is still recording his vitals, then turns the lights off to let him get some rest as she goes to fix herself some breakfast.

The past three days have been nerve-wracking, to say the least. She’d been working on Marius’s arm for a bit, after finding him leaned a bit too casually against the wreckage of an old mecha, nearly bleeding out from his crushed arm. It wasn’t the injury itself that killed him, but the subsequent infection, after he refused to let Raphaella amputate what was left of it.

Two weeks later, as he lay dying in a feverish haze, she presented him with the arm. “I don’t want to die,” he begged, over and over again. “Please don’t let me die, Raph. I’ve made it so fucking far.”

So she replaced his arm, watched him convulse and cry and plead as the mechanism took hold in his painfully fragile mody, and now she sits over a lukewarm cup of tea and wonders if she’s doomed her first immortal friend to an eternity of suffering.

Her wings hurt, when she first woke up with them, but nothing like the pain Marius appeared to be in. Maybe her work was too rushed, or she got cocky, or there were certain prerequisites for mechanization that she never knew about. Maybe—

Marius coughs in the other room, and she realizes that she’s been staring into her tea for nearly an hour.

“Raph?” he asks as she strides back into the lab, which currently doubles as a recovery room, given the limited space on their ship. “Oh! It’s you. I just wanted to say that my arm doesn’t hurt anymore, and I am fine, and I would like to have some ice cream now, please.”

She sits down on the edge of his bed, careful not to jostle him, and raises an eyebrow. “We don’t have any ice cream, Marius.”

“We—we don’t? Why not?”

“Because we’re two weeks away from the nearest civilization in any direction,” she explains, feeling his forehead with the back of her hand. It’s unscientific, but he feels cool enough that she’s not concerned. “You finished all the ice cream a while ago.”

Marius looks genuinely heartbroken. Then Raphaella laughs, because she can’t help it, and the devastation on his face gives way to something wide-eyed and uncomfortably genuine that makes her squirm. “You look like an angel,” he says.

Wings flaring outside of her control, Raphaella schools her face into something neutral. “Is that so?”

“Yeah. Wings are catching the light all… shimmery… and your  _ hair,  _ how d’you get it to look all wavy like that? Like it’s swimming.” The way his eyes travel up and down the length of Raphaella’s hair tells her that he’s definitely seeing something she can’t.

“I think you’re just on a lot of narcotics,” she informs him. “I know I’m nice to look at, but  _ angel  _ is a strong word.”

Marius waves his flesh hand at her, which is weird, because last she checked, he was still restrained. “Not like. A  _ good  _ angel. You’re… evil science angel. All, like, giving me an arm and transing my gender and shit. But, like, fucked up and evil.”

“Mhm.”

“Are you single?” He looks up at her suddenly, eyes round. “I keep forgetting to ask you that.”

Raphaella scrutinizes his face, which is very earnest and  _ very  _ high. “Marius. You are the only person I know, in the universe, and last I checked we’re not dating. Did you  _ need  _ to ask that?”

He makes a gesture halfway between a shrug and a pout. “Dunno. Maybe you had a secret romance with a… a… computer or something. None of my business anyway.” Before Raphaella can respond, he gets distracted by something on the ceiling, then looks down at her again with surprising clarity. “You only saved me ‘cause I know shit about machines, right?”

“I… what?”

Marius tilts his head to one side as if to get a better look at her. “If I’m the only person you know, that means you don’t go around picking up strays because they’re hurt, or trans, or wildly attractive. You needed me for something. Maybe just a test subject, I dunno.”

He’s not  _ wrong,  _ but Raphaella never expected it to come up so bluntly, and she’s not sure how to respond. Normally, she wouldn’t care about coddling her research subjects. But Marius is permanent at this rate, and even if she  _ did  _ get rid of him somehow, she’s surprised to find that the thought is… unappealing. “I… don’t make a habit of it, no.”

“How long have you been alive, la Cognizi?”

She bites her lip. “Two hundred years, give or take.”

“And when was the last time you had a friend?”

That’s a harder question. She’s grown attached to people since her mechanization, but never for more than a few months at a time. Never long enough to entertain the idea of bringing them along with her. Half the time, she kills them before she can get too soft about it. And here’s Marius, who she’s known for a few weeks, who sees right through her as if his coal-black eyes are invisible lasers, and yet he still puts her at ease with his witty smiles and patient touches. After two hundred years, she struggles to hold herself together sometimes, but she knows that’ll only get easier with someone else on board.

That’s a relief, because she’s  _ definitely  _ stuck with him now. “I… haven’t,” she responds at last. “I killed my last friend to mechanize myself. I picked you up because I—I wanted to try again, I guess? I’m not in the business of mercy killings. And, yeah, you have some useful knowledge, but you know I could pick up robotics on my own fast enough.”

He continues to study her for a minute, then smiles, soft and genuine. “I figured as much. It’s okay! I think I’m worth your while, after all.”

Raphaella should be concerned by the fact that he’s so unbothered by being used, but given what he’s told her about his life, it doesn’t come as a surprise. “I think so, too,” she admits. “And right now, I think you’re high as a solar kite, and you need to get some sleep.”

“Raaaph,” he whines.

“You know I’m right.”

**Author's Note:**

> The more I think about Marius and Raph fucking around in space being dumb baby immortals before they meet the rest of the Mechs, the more obsessed I get. They're both such awful idiots. I want to know what they got up to. Also, I'm like 85% sure I have food poisoning, so I needed something kinda light-hearted (if emotionally angsty, due to them being horrible people).
> 
> We're so close to the end, folks. My to-do list is getting Huge. I have so much stuff to work on once I'm done with these ficlets. And I am tired. comment if you would like to feed me one (1) saltine, because that's about all I can have rn. :')
> 
> (yknow one time i saw a tumblr post about stuff you should or shouldn't include in your end notes and it was like talking about how to be confident and professional ig?? and here i am telling you all that my digestive system is staging a revolt against my body because i have absolutely no concept of when too much information is too much so here we are)


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